The History of History (42 page)

“Don’t cry,” Regina said.

Margaret looked up at her.

“It was only a test.”

But if it was only a test—Margaret blinked. And then she thought: No. It did not matter what Regina said, the wise and gentle woman was gone, and the bear had come to stay. The bear was truer. The bear, if it were ever encapsulated, would not be the sugar pill.

Margaret looked in the mirror and saw a bear on all fours on the floor of the foyer, beginning to rise up again, opening its darling and terrible mouth—an ursine clown—hungry, on top of its hoisting thighs, for Margaret’s life.

O
f course, it was only a dream.

But some dreams will not easily die. In the weeks afterward, a leftover chirring, a fly in the room, an intermittent itch on Margaret’s cheek—it remained. The fly’s legs chafed her consciousness like the wires of a bugging device that can be discovered but not removed.

Margaret had to find her way back to the old Regina.

A long, long time, she had occupied herself with pageants—she saw that now. Her alliances and identifications were the pseudo-involvement of the sleeping dog that moves its paws as it lies, dreaming of the hunt.

But she had to take sides now. And not take sides quixotically, but by loving the right Regina actively, committing herself through some irrevocable sign. And like so many people whose rage has too long been impotent, Margaret Taub was vulnerable to fantasies of vengeance.

One of the unstillable horrors of the Holocaust is that there is no vengeance to be had. Millions killed by millions more—there is no justice there. There will be no restitution. The victims are too many; the perpetrators are legion. The perpetrators are in every yard, in every government that provided police support, in every town that cast Jews out of knitting circles and marching bands, out of guilds and pensions, that starved neighbors out to the cattle cars all across Europe. Before and after it was a political policy, the Holocaust was a social movement. Not civilian cooperation but civilian enthusiasm was the sine qua non of the Shoah. A wave of genocidal anti-Semitism washed the Western world during the first twitches of modernity, and the Nazis rode the crest of it as it crashed; gave it forever a German face. But the dagger of revenge lies unused in the drawer. There is no body into which to plunge it. Margaret had been flailing against the stone-cold wall of vengeancelessness—she had been flailing against that nonsense-truth for a long time.

The dream of the bear. To herself, Margaret said it had “broken her heart.” But in the days afterward, she thought she had dreamed the dream for this reason: she wished for such a Regina. She wished for a Regina who fought and killed. Not because she loved heroes, not because it would mean justice, but because she did not know how to live in a world where there was no second fight. In such a universe, she did not even know how to think.

Now—mark what happened next. In the following weeks, the dice were loaded. Margaret was stuffed to the bursting point with a heavy desire for vengeance. And if it could not be on a grand scale, then it should be on a small one. And so there came a blind spin of fortune’s wheel, and when it came to a stop, the arrow rested on the only person it could have rested on. The only man who was still alive. Hitler’s bodyguard, the old man in his potpourri house, Arthur Prell.

Are you surprised? But it could have rested on no other!

This is how it went. The first days after Margaret’s dream, they passed slowly, tediously. It was as though, in her fascination with vengeance, Margaret was waiting for the arrival of hordes, an army gathering in the east, and she could not fight her ferocious fight until they arrived. She bided her time.

And then, slowly, she began to think of him. She remembered how, when she had seen him near the bunker talking to skateboarding kids, she had remained still, even when she had wanted to flee or destroy him. And she remembered how, behind the veil of paralysis, she had felt forced to betray her own kin.

She remembered bringing him chocolates, and this was the worst memory of all.

And then at some precise moment, it struck her that Arthur Prell was the only place, in her own life, where the past was still alive. Could he be called a chink in the armor of vengeancelessness, could he be called a hole in the shield of lost opportunity and vanished time?

One night in late April, when the evening outside wore a black and yellow cloak, Margaret looked out into the shadows. The streetlights were yellow fireballs in these days of fog, the trees were black stalagmites of wet dust. Elysian life hovered far above human eyes, and the primrose secondary maze—it was hidden. But somewhere in the darkness out there, that man was living.

She did not know what it was she was meant to do. She was only sure of one thing: the beauty of the early Regina, the one she had first imagined, the unspeakable softness of her sweet story—like the spot on the crown of the head of a newborn baby where the bones have yet to knit together—was only something she could endure thinking of if there were some vengeance to be had in this life.

Even if it was logically impossible, Margaret must have vengeance. She must mark the end of her stupefied, soap-statue innocence.

She told herself: the end of such an innocence will be something hard and terrible. It cannot be otherwise. Because if restitution were made in some more usual way, by embarking, say, upon a life of devotion or altruistic acts, she would only appear to be reformed, while in reality never bending her character, never taking a scalpel to her personality’s infection, the infection whose name is passivity.

Margaret looked out the window. The air knit tight together and the fog pressed forth a drizzle. A man on the Grunewaldstrasse—in the smeary ball of light under the streetlamp, he seemed to be dressed all in brown leather. Something about his posture reminded her of Arthur Prell.

Margaret opened the window wide and put her head out into the moist night.

The horselike face of the tall bodyguard, Arthur Prell, bore down on her mind’s eye, but when the man turned it was a stranger’s face that called its little dachshund after it.

Arthur Prell deserved to be punished, Margaret thought. And she—she deserved to be guilty. What if Prell paid by becoming a victim, and what if she, Margaret, paid by becoming a perpetrator? Her heart beat harder. The man in brown leather disappeared down the street, gulped into the fog.

Margaret drew her head in. She turned her bright eyes on the flat around her. She had a heat in her skull. And on that night, Margaret walked around the center of the living room in a slow circle, as though she would trace a spell, or consecrate a marriage.

The night wore on and she could not dream, could not drink, could not stop moving her legs. The time of waiting was almost at an end now—she sensed it. She looped. Her mind worked.

She had to go back to see Prell again. And she was terrified of the visit and of what would happen there.

She circled. She did not begin to move straight until the next morning,
when the first thing she did was this: she went back to see the good Dr. Arabscheilis.

At the doctor’s office
, padded walls of adrenaline buttressed Margaret. She was allowed to go directly through to the back room. She was light; she walked on water.

The doctor was in her old place behind the heavy desk.

The woman caressed the open pages of a book.

“You once offered me mentorship,” Margaret began loudly. The room seemed to shudder under the blow of her voice.

Too, the doctor’s head wobbled. The woman’s gaze remained fixed, startled by the volume. “Who is there?”

“It’s me, Margaret. Margaret Taub.”

“Ah, my dear Margaret Täubner.” The doctor breathed in her rasping, rhythmic way—an aural representation of honeycomb lungs.

“Doctor, I want your advice.”

“By all means, comrade. Please. Sit down.”

“I want to kill a man,” Margaret said. “A bad person, a person whose existence is a travesty.”

“My child, what are you saying?”

“I want to kill a bad man.”

“Do you mean there is a dangerous sort of person on the loose? Perhaps you should call in the law, comrade.”

“No, no,” Margaret said. She had not foreseen this. “You don’t understand. Anyone would agree that the man should die, but—I would not say he’s a danger. Except as a corruption to morals. And he doesn’t happen to be at the mercy of any law.” Margaret was breathing hard, very much in her own mind. “But I would like you, as a doctor, as a citizen, to give me your blessing.”

The doctor grimaced. “
You
sound like the danger, young Margaret. What are we talking about? A parricide? A vaticide?”

Margaret blew out through her nostrils.

“He’s an old Nazi,” she said. “He lives out in Rudow. He was with the SS.”

“Ah,” the doctor said, very slowly.

A moment passed.

Then the doctor said, “There are many SS men still living today. There are many more that are dead already, and many others that are
dying as we speak, all without your help. They don’t need you to bring them to an early death. They don’t do anyone any harm anymore, Margaret.” The doctor looked at her. “Is this one particularly bad?”

“He’s not particularly bad,” Margaret conceded, although only outwardly. “But he’s the one I know.”

“Is he to be a token murder, or is he the first in a series?” the doctor asked. She touched her finger to her tongue and caught a page of her large, white book with it. The sound of the rustling page loaded the room.

“A token murder,” Margaret said.

The doctor, as always, was ruining everything.

“For the crime of having been a member of the SS, a crime of association? Or did he commit particular atrocities?” the doctor asked.

“He was not directly involved in any killing. And if you must know, he has already spent ten years in a Soviet prison.” Margaret pulled her opal ring on and off. It had been her mother’s. “He was tortured.”

“So you would agree with me that this man is not dangerous?”

“I would not say so. Not in particular.”

“I see. And he himself never committed any particular … atrocities?”

Margaret punched her head forward toward the doctor. “His existence is a crime. He may not be guilty, but”—Margaret spoke in a low voice—“it’s a gift, Doctor. I see it as a gift. That a killer is still alive for me to kill. There are still opportunities to carry out justice.” Her eyes glowed.

The doctor did not respond immediately. Margaret breathed and waited. She looked eagerly at the doctor. The woman’s eyes were half closed.

“It’s a gift that I only got by the skin of my teeth,” Margaret went on. “I may have been born late, but I was not born
too
late.” Margaret was almost shy in her excitement. “Everyone looks but no one acts,” she said. “I have been given a great blessing: an opportunity.”

There was a long silence. Had the doctor fallen asleep? Her eyes were closed and her chest moved strangely. But all at once the woman spoke.

“Margaret,” she said. “Has it never occurred to you, as you’ve sat with me in this office, that I was once a Nazi myself?”

Margaret looked at her. The walls were very close around her. To the front and back of her, time was contracting.

“You didn’t suspect?” asked the doctor.

Margaret was alone now. “I was naïve,” she said.

“There are two types of naïfs—the one who is naïve because of lack of attention, seeing only what bounces naturally into his basket of personal greeds, and the one who notices everything but instead of weaving the hints into meaning, lets them lie in shards. Which are you?”

“I’ll be going,” Margaret said. She stood up violently. Her chair fell over behind her.

“Wait,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you my story.”

And despite herself, Margaret stayed. She picked up her chair. She had always liked a story.

Y
ou already know what became of my brother, your nominal”—the doctor coughed—“your nominal grandfather.” Margaret cried out, but the doctor cut her off with a sharp wave of her hand.

“Now, my brother—it has probably occurred to you that I was nothing like him. He was a talented man,” the doctor said, “but I was the true intellect of the family.” She smiled tightly. “Forgive my self-flattery. Although you probably also know that in those days, especially under the Nazis, women were encouraged to stick to the three
K
s—
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
, it wouldn’t surprise me if you also knew that there were many exceptions to this, none more well known than the great Leni Riefenstahl herself, although how she managed to make her films in that man’s world, I’ll never know.

“My parents valued achievement, even in women, and when it became apparent, as I say, that while my brother had charisma, I was the brains, it was not looked upon askance that I should go to university. And so I traveled every day from our villa on the Wannsee to the University of Berlin, traveling through the hustle and bustle of Alexanderplatz and the Scheunenviertel, where immigrants, crooks, and scalawags had their paradise—it was a different world than the one I knew.

“I began at the university the same year as my brother’s incident in the Saxon woods, that is to say, in 1938. (My brother was only a year younger than I.) And I began to study medicine right away. Do you know who also did that? Hitler’s young niece, down in Munich back in 1931, although it seems she never went to a day of classes.”

“The activities of Hitler’s niece do not interest me,” said Margaret.

“Is that so?” The doctor showed a particular type of contempt at this, but let it drop. “All right then,” she said. “Well, I was a precocious student. My temperament is naturally scientific. Already in 1941, I received my diploma with a thesis on endoscopic abdominal surgery.
This thesis put forth various proposals detailing how the practice of endoscopic surgery could be expanded to include many more types of gynecological surgeries than were performed in this way at the time. Endoscopy—the use of an instrument to see the inside of the human body without cutting it open, or making only a tiny incision. Also the mechanical alteration of the interior of the body through the use of such a device. Imagine, then, this idea that you could, for example, take out the appendix of a woman by going in through her vaginal canal and uterus, no major incisions necessary! Incisions can lead to infection, take a great deal of time for the surgeon, who must stop the flow of blood to the area, and are higher risk for the patient as well, who is usually, especially in that era, under general anesthesia.